Boland is referring to a quasi-accurate “Star Trek: The Exhibition” reconstruction of the U.S.S. Enterprise bridge, complete with a command chair somewhat like the chair made famous by Capt. James Tiberius Kirk.

Boland, of St. Paul, recently visited the exhibition with his kids. It was his Father’s Day treat, and he therefore didn’t make a stink about the steep admission price ($17 for adults, $10 for kids) along with the separate charge for a bridge photo. In fact, he bought two of those.

As he went on in his Facebook post:

Did I go with my kids and give them my money anyway? Yes. Yes, I sure did. And I’d do it again. Really, just to sit in that chair.

But does Boland now feel he got taken to the cleaners? Why yes, yes he does.

This disappoints me, but it doesn’t surprise me since I ran into an identical situation in 2010 when I visited another “Star Trek” exhibition at the Tech Museum of Innovation in downtown San Jose, Calif.

That exhibition also had a semi-accurate bridge and Enterprise transporter room. As I noted in a Pioneer Press story shortly after my visit:

I was a bit less impressed with the exhibit’s much-ballyhooed James T. Kirk-era Enterprise bridge and the transporter room, which don’t look as authentic as they should. Still, I sat in the captain’s chair, looking all commander-ly, and I stood in the transporter and uttered the immortal command: “Energize!”

Exhibit employees took digital photos of me in the chair and on the transporter, then zapped them wirelessly to a nearby computer for my inspection.

Here’s where I soured on this “Star Trek” experience. I wanted my pictures in digital form. In fact, I could see the JPEG files, right there in a folder on the preview terminal. C’mon, guys, burn them onto a DVD or put ’em on a thumb drive. I would have paid handsomely.

No such luck:

The staffers would sell only a cheesy physical picture partially obscured with “Star Trek” lettering, and charge a fortune (while acknowledging almost everyone asks for the files). What a scam. I didn’t bite. And — you guessed it — you are not allowed to take your own photos.

I had better luck recently, snagging photos of myself sitting on the bridge chair at the Mall of America. My phone captured these (see one of the photos at the bottom of this post), and I didn’t have to pay, either — but that’s because I was visiting in a press capacity and not as a customer, as Boland did.

Boland said he wouldn’t have minded the bridge-photo fees as much if the photos had been of reasonably good quality, but “the original is just awful,” he told me in a phone interview.

“You have to pay for a paper photo with really horrible color rendering,” he said. “That is where I really struggle … I’m really glad someone brought these (“Star Trek”) things to the Twin Cities … but I had to pay for a photo that should have been as good as any taken with the phones we had. That’s what really bugged me. That is the part that felt like a rip-off.”

Taking phone photos at the exhibition, of course, was never an option. As Boland entered the exhibit, he was repeatedly warned via signage everywhere that the installation bans personal photography. (There’s no mention of this and the bridge-photography fees on the exhibition’s site.)

“It was my time with my kids and I wanted to have a memory,” he said, “but you can’t use your own camera.”

A desperate Boland later shot a digital photo of his physical bridge pic, “and I tried to correct it a little in Photoshop, but I can’t make this look like a photo taken in the 21st century.”

That’s ironic, since “Star Trek” is set in the 23rd and 24th centuries.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata blogs regularly about tech and nerd trends. Find his posts here and here. Learn more about him at ojezap.com.

Julio's Pioneer Press duties include writing, often about tech, and helping manage the paper's website and social media. He also uses virtual-reality cameras and other tech tools to commit journalism. In his spare time, Julio writes for the TidBITS Apple-news site, where he is a contributing editor. See his blog at ojezap.com.

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